Marathon Petroleum is a downstream energy company. Co.'s segments are: Refining and Marketing, which refines crude oil and other feedstocks, including renewable feedstocks, at Co.'s refineries in the Gulf Coast, Mid-Continent and West Coast regions of the U.S., purchases refined products and ethanol for resale and distributes refined products, including renewable diesel, through transportation, storage, distribution and marketing services provided by its Midstream segment; and Midstream, which transports, stores, distributes and markets crude oil and refined products principally for the Refining and Marketing segment via refining logistics assets, pipelines, terminals, towboats and barges.
When researching a stock like Marathon Petroleum, many investors are the most familiar with Fundamental Analysis — looking at a company's balance sheet, earnings, revenues, and what's happening in that company's underlying business. Investors who use Fundamental Analysis to identify good stocks to buy or sell can also benefit from MPC Technical Analysis to help find a good entry or exit point. Technical Analysis is blind to the fundamentals and looks only at the trading data for MPC stock — the real life supply and demand for the stock over time — and examines that data in different ways. One of these ways is called the Relative Strength Index, or RSI. This popular indicator, originally developed in the 1970's by J. Welles Wilder, looks at a 14-day moving average of a stock's gains on its up days, versus its losses on its down days. The resulting MPC RSI is a value that measures momentum, oscillating between "oversold" and "overbought" on a scale of zero to 100. A reading below 30 is viewed to be oversold, which a bullish investor could look to as a sign that the selling is in the process of exhausting itself, and look for entry point opportunities. A reading above 70 is viewed to be overbought, which could indicate that a rally in progress is starting to get crowded with buyers. If the rally has been a long one, that could be a sign that a pullback is overdue. |